Disappearance
The Normalization of the Extreme
Brad Evans author Chantal Meza author
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Edinburgh University Press
Publishing:31st Dec '26
£25.00
This title is due to be published on 31st December, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
What was once a hidden secret defining totalitarian regimes has become the defining problem of our times. Every day we encounter stories concerning the disappearance of humans, communities, cultures, and life sustaining ecosystems. Disappearance has also become a dominant theme in popular entertainment, as we have normalised the extreme. But how are we to make sense of this? This is not just about increased awareness. It now openly touches our most primal of fears – to vanish without a trace – which has been amplified in our visual landscapes that depend upon and yet weaponize the value we place on appearances. Recognizing this state of affairs and the ways in which societies are precariously hovering over disappearance fault-lines, this book will map out in original ways the history of the phenomena to offer an urgent and timely intervention. Moving beyond old ideas concerning bodies, the authors demand new ways of seeing disappearance to inspire alternative ways of thinking and responses. Disappearance, they argue, is a form of neuroviolence that is inseparable from the invisible operations of power. Hence countering it, not only requires that we make visible those forces which continue to annihilate life, it is to look precisely at the way disappearance now structures our societies and is inseparable from any concern with power in the world.
How to visualise those who vanish without a trace? How to understand the void left by enforced disappearance? In a fascinating, original and insightful blend of philosophy, art, politics and ethics, Brad Evans and Chantal Meza take us from the Holocaust to Pinochet’s Chile and from contemporary Mexico to Gaza. Along the way they ask important questions and resist the temptation of easy answers. -- Roland Bleiker, Professor of International Relations, University of Queensland
An ambitious, unsettling and innovative book that places disappearance at the heart of a far-reaching contemporary shift. Evans and Meza turn disappearance into a global lens through which to interpret contemporary forms of violence, power and erasure. It is no longer merely a crime, but an underlying structure of the present. Although rooted in contexts as intense as that of Mexico, the book transcends any national framework to chart a truly global map of disappearance, linking enforced disappearances, ecologies of violence, surveillance regimes and contemporary forms of war and control. Through dense and evocative writing, and a radical intersection of art and theory, the book proposes new ways of seeing that which ‘tends to disappear’. The result is an original and demanding work that compels us to think—and to see—in a different way that which, increasingly, defines our world. -- Gabriel Gatti, The University of the Basque Country
ISBN: 9781788219167
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
240 pages